TB: I wanted to ask about the texts. They feel somewhat self-referential, but then you’re not quite getting a glimpse into what you’re saying, there’s a push and pull as a viewer, and a sense of resistance. I was thinking about digital aesthetics, online, post-internet culture, how we’re all putting ourselves out there all the time. What does that mean to you when you put text onto these paintings?

NL: I’m a fugitive of being pinned down. My previous works were a lot about an internal world and explored a very naïve way of visualising the world where I gravitated towards colours. These works, I wanted them to have text in them but I didn’t want them to be texts I came up with. They are sourced, and I like this idea that a lot of things are just part of our collective consciousness. So, for instance, the white ones are from Junya Watanabe’s poem shirts from Commes des Garcons from the early 2000s.. What I loved about them is that a lot of the text is almost absurd, and bizarre. I like the idea of sampling and of grabbing on to other people’s texts. Although my work is very personal, I never want to explicitly insert myself into the work. I like to surround or circle the work and to sample, because I do spend a lot of time online, sample the things I’m finding and seeing into the work and create a conversation that way.

TB: What’s your screen time like?

NL: Ugh, embarrassing!

But the thing about being online is that it really informs your identity, more than we realise. I can say something that is a reference to some image. So, we’re then talking in images. And I like this idea that this online world forms our identities, our relationships, and the way we perceive things. These works are very much about interpersonal relationships.

TB: Yes, there’s something uncomfortable about the texts too, ‘I don’t want to be your darling’ or ‘I want to be you’…the obsessive side of the internet.

The absurdity is interesting in relation to Nauman because he has that interest in Samuel Beckett, that stream of consciousness, and these works come out as a collective stream of consciousness. You’ve spoken about having a dialogue between the works you make, do you see that in this series?

NL: Whenever I make a show, I try to think about how they work together in conversation with each other. I never make a work and think, ‘this is going to be on its own, this is going to carry everything and carry its own meaning devoid of everything that’s around it’. I like to make works in a series, and I wanted to make a ‘Black series’, thinking about this colour black in contrast to a very colourful body of work, although these paintings are very colourful underneath…